Friday, August 29, 2014

While I continue to find good uses for Arduinos and such small microcontrollers, lately I've been playing around quite a bit with the Raspberry Pi. I got one last year, and fairly quickly set it up to be my surrogate Dropbox, using BTSync. It has been happily chugging along in that role ever since, connected to a small 100GB hard drive and living on my workbench in the garage.

I also picked up a Pi at work, to drive a slideshow on a big screen in our lobby, and at trade shows and conferences. That's worked quite well, using 'fbi' as a lightweight image display tool -- the Pi boots up, and immediately looks for a slideshow directory on a USB stick from which to display a sequence of images. For a recent conference, I added an open WiFi network that served up PDFs of our organization's papers -- anyone could connect to the network, and immediately download our papers, on the spot.

The latest distribution of Raspbian (the most common variety of OS for the Pi) includes Wolfram's "language" and Mathematica -- which are great tools, but not inexpensive for the desktop versions. I thought it would be interesting to see how they run on the Pi, and set out to do an installation. I promptly ran into my need for a decent HDMI-driven display; the HDTV we have is an older CRT, progressive-scan model, and the image quality for computers is poor. I have a couple VGA and DVI monitors, but the HDMI-VGA converter I bought for the Pi doesn't play well with the monitor, and I don't have an HDMI-DVI converter. That leaves me stuck with the TV, which makes me squint and guess at what's on the screen.

Add to that, the only keyboards I have around that have actual USB cables on them, have assorted non-functioning keys, as I discovered in the course of trying to use them to configure the Pi. Said keyboards are now in the pile destined for electronics recycling...

I did eventually get things working, but found Mathematica's UI to be a bit too slow when running on the Pi. I'll have to go back and try it on the command line for comparison.

That exercise led me to want some indication of what the Pi thought its IP address was, post-boot. It's hard to connect to something being recalcitrant on the network, without any idea of its address. Adafruit has a nice step-by-step for adding a 16x2 display, and I happened to have all the parts on hand, so I started breadboarding it. However - there are some software installations needed on the Pi, and in the present configuration I could _connect_ to the Pi, but it wasn't on the Web.

Which led to figuring out how to share the wifi connection from my dev laptop (10+ years old, Pentium 4, running #! slowly but adequately) to the Pi over ethernet.... This turns out to be ridiculously easy on the Linux side, but requires the Pi to be set up with a static IP on boot in order to "just work", at least the way I went about it. But: success! I can plug the Pi into an ethernet cable, plug that into the laptop, and log into the Pi - which can now see the web, so I can easily install software onto it.

So, having downloaded and installed a plethora of software libraries on the Pi, I could finally try making something display on the LCD. Since the Adafruit tutorial was written, though, their library code has changed; the wiring described in the tutorial doesn't work with the current examples packaged with the library, so the LCD shows signs of life, but never actually does anything useful unless you get the wiring sorted. I eventually figured this out, and now have it all happily working - the LCD displays time & IP address, updated every 2 sec. Hoorah!

For future reference, and in case anyone stumbles across this post having run into the same issue, the correct connections between the LCD and Pi are (for a Pi model B):